[ale] spam

[Marvin Dickens]

All the talk about spam made me look at the email statistics for my
business (A small technology business) as well as for me personally.
Now, I've not given spam any real thought for about 4 years (I suppose
that's because I've used spam protection for so long it has not been an
issue for me...). FWIW, spam was the 3rd largest category out of 8
categories that I use to classify my email. Assuming that I am at
somewhere between middle and high end of typical users of email (At
least as far as quantities of email per week), this amount of spam is
ridiculous. This has got to be costing everybody a mint (You, me, them,
those people over there and etc...)

My email statistics for 5 days beginning Monday and ending tonight at
11:41PM: 

Categories	Quantity

business   	109 
linux_general   325  
linux_spca   	9  
linux_video   	28  
news   		15  
personal   	24  
spam   		78 <--------<<<  
sql_ledger   	27 

I have no idea how 98% of these slugs got my email address(s) other than
harvesting them from mailing lists or by other dubious means unknown to
me. It seems to me that if you want to stop spam, white lists, Bayesian
statistics and such treat only the symptoms and are not an effective
deterrent against the real problem: The spam itself. Even the new
earthlink thing is defeatable (At least it seems to me that it is...) 

Further, it appears to me that using a technology to make it impossible
for the email addresses to harvested (Don't ask me how. I don't know...)
and/or making the monetary cost of sending spam so high as to make the
act of spamming prohibitive: Something like a spam fine or tax that is
payable to the IRS (Lying to the IRS about how much spam you sent in a
year could land you in the Grey Bar Hilton and Resort. This ought to
have an impact...). Now, I'm not a big fan of bigger government. At the
same time I'm not a fan of high taxes. With that said, I look at this
not so much as a tax, but as an incentive *NOT* to be in the spamming
business. OTOH, something like this could be the first step in an email
tax which I *TOTALLY* oppose. Regardless, something has got to be done
to make the act of spamming as a profession go the way of streaking...

 
Best

M. Dickens 



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